Fire Illuminations Wadada Leo Smith and Orange Wave Electric

• 1Ntozake Shange15:53
• 2Muhammad Ali’s Spiritual Horizon03:52
• 3Fire Illuminations in side the Particles of Light04:35
• 4Tony Williams15:43
• 5Muhammad Ali and George Forman Rumble in Zaire Africa08:26
• Total Runtime48:29

Info for Fire Illuminations

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith with Orange Wave Electric, an all-star electric band including guitarists Nels Cline, Brandon Ross and Lamar Smith; bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs; electronic musician Hardedge; percussionist Mauro Refosco; and drummer Pheeroan akLaff.

Legendary trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith debuts his all-star ensemble Orange Wave Electric with the exhilarating Fire Illuminations. This scintillating album features Nels Cline, Brandon Ross, Lamar Smith, Bill Laswell, Melvin Gibbs, Hardedge, Pheeroan akLaff and Mauro Refosco.

“Wadada Leo Smith has played an outsize role in American experimental music for the last 50 years.” – Seth Colter Walls, New York Times

“In a half-century of recording, [Wadada Leo Smith] has never stopped exploring the parameters of the form and instrument.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz

Throughout 2022, Wadada Leo Smith celebrated his 80th birthday with one of the most prolific and creative year’s worth of releases in his – and perhaps anybody’s – history to date. Lest anyone should imagine that this breathtaking run was in any way valedictory, the now 81-year-old Smith returns with his first of several planned releases for 2023. The exhilarating Fire Illuminations, due out March 31, 2023 on Smith’s own Kabell Records label, features his newly assembled ensemble Orange Wave Electric.

“Assembled” is the operative word in this case, as Smith recorded the album in a series of sessions and configurations, compiling the final product through extensive post-production. He had an embarrassment of riches to work with: Orange Wave Electric is an all-star electric band including guitarists Nels Cline, Brandon Ross and Lamar Smith; bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs; electronic musician Hardedge; percussionist Mauro Refosco; and drummer Pheeroan akLaff.

“Orange is such a vitalizing color,” Smith says in regard to the name of this brilliant new configuration. “It relates to the vitality of electricity that I'm working with in this ensemble.”

Smith shares history with many of these musicians; akLaff in particular has been a vital collaborator for more than four decades. Smith has recorded with Ross and Gibbs in the guise of their bold trio Harriet Tubman, while Laswell joined the trumpeter along with the late percussion master Milford Graves for 2021’s inspired Sacred Ceremonies. Both Cline, famous as a member of Wilco, and Lamar Smith have been members of Wadada’s Organic group. Only Refosco is a new acquaintance, though he’s long been an acclaimed percussionist best known for his work with David Byrne and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Ever innovative in his quest for new methods of composing, guiding, and creating improvised music, Smith crafted the five expansive compositions on Fire Illuminations in the studio from a series of recording dates conducted and edited over the course of nearly four years. He cites such precedents as the groundbreaking work of Jamaican reggae and dub innovator Lee “Scratch” Perry and Miles Davis classics like Bitches Brew and On the Corner.

“That's why the studio is there,” Smith insists. “The studio is not just for capturing or sampling sounds, but it's also an instrument which one can use to not just enhance but build a larger creation.”

The ensemble is utilized in various configurations throughout Fire Illuminations. The full group is present for the opening track, “Ntozake,” on which Smith’s reverberant trumpet and the coruscating guitar tones emerge from a loping, muscular groove and Hardedge’s sub-level sonics. The piece is named for the late playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, best known for her landmark Obie Award-winning 1975 play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Citing her powerful poetry and its confrontation of racial and feminist issues, Smith calls Shange “a hero to me.”

All nine musicians also converge on “Tony Williams,” the latest in a number of tributes to the pioneering drummer that Smith has conceived (including a duet with Laswell on Sacred Ceremonies). Smith calls Williams “one of the greatest, most gifted drummers ever. What makes him important is his ability to play multiple metrics, which he intertwined with rhythm. His contribution to the Miles Davis Quintet was so refreshing and creative. He was one of the only musicians that challenged that whole band. The drummer brings another kind of creative energy inside the ensemble that unlocks all of the doors towards inspiration.”

Smith dedicated two pieces to the famed boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. The first, “Muhammad Ali’s Spiritual Horizon,” features only Lamar Smith on guitar along with the roiling, percolating rhythm section, while “Muhammad Ali and George Foreman Rumble in Zaire Africa,” inspired by the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” where Ali won with his rope-a-dope technique, pares the band down to Wadada, Cline, Laswell, Gibbs and akLaff.

“Muhammad Ali demonstrated the greatest quality of humanity when he refused to fight a war that he didn't believe in,” Smith says. “He lost everything because of that, but in the end, because he made that political statement, he gained everything back and much more. That's a model that we can look to: if you make the right decision from your heart, the creator will always return that to you in a greater way. And the Rumble in Zaire shows something about his spirit and his understanding that it's not the strongest, the most powerful, the wealthiest or the most influential person that controls the world. Strategy is what gets you across the finish line.”

The final piece, “Fire Illuminations Inside the Particles of Light,” was the most challenging to construct from its disparate pieces. It’s a constantly shifting and evolving piece, dense with layers that Smith’s clarion trumpet scythes through like a beacon. The composer relates it to the transformative nature of fire itself, and its foundational role in the development of human civilization. A monumental concept, no doubt, but if Smith’s music has revealed nothing else over the past half-century, it’s that he’s a thinker and creator on the grandest of scales.

Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet
Nels Cline, guitar (tracks 1, 4, 5)
Brandon Ross, guitar (tracks 1, 4)
Lamar Smith, guitar (tracks 1-4)
Bill Laswell, bass
Melvin Gibbs, bass
Mauro Refosco, percussion (tracks 1-3)
Pheeroan AkLaff, drums, electronics

Wadada Leo Smith
Born on December 18, 1941 in Leland, Mississippi, Wadada Leo Smith began his musical journey steeped in the musical traditions of the South. He composed his first piece of music at the age of twelve, and at thirteen started performing with Delta Blues and other traditional bands. In high school he played in and served as assistant director of the concert and marching bands under the direction of Mr. Henderson Howard.

Smith received his formal musical education from his stepfather, composer/guitarist Alex “Little Bill” Wallace, one of the pioneers of electric guitar in Delta Blues. He was further educated through the U.S. Military band program at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (1963); Sherwood School of Music (1967-69); and Wesleyan University (1975-76). He has researched a variety of music cultures, including African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American.

Smith defines his music as “Creative Music,” and his diverse discography reveals a recorded history of music centered in the idea of spiritual harmony and the unification of social and cultural issues of his world.

He has created Ankhrasmation, a symbolic image-based language for performers or musicians. He started his research and designs in search of Ankhrasmation in 1965, and his first realization of this language was in 1967, when it was illustrated in the recording of The Bell (Anthony Braxton: ‘Three Compositions of New Jazz’). Ankhrasmation has played a significant role in Wadada’s development as an artist, ensemble leader and educator.

Smith’s Ankhrasmation language scores have been exhibited in major American museums including The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, which in October 2015 presented the first comprehensive exhibition of these language scores. In 2016, the Hammer Museum’s ‘Made in L.A.’ exhibition featured the scores and presented Smith with the Mohn Award for Career Achievement honoring “brilliance and resilience.” His scores have also been shown at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan, the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, The Museum of Rhythm Łódź, Poland and the Clemente Gallery in NYC.

Smith was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ten Freedom Summers, (Defining Moments in the History of the United States of America), a collection of compositions inspired by the civil rights movement and released as a 4-CD boxed set. Ten Freedom Summers has also been awarded a MAP Fund Award (2011), Chamber Music America New Works Grant (2010), National Endowment for the Arts Recording Grant (2010), Southwest Chamber Music commission with support from the James Irvine Foundation and Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009-2010). Smith was named DownBeat Magazine’s Composer of the Year in 2013.

In 2016 Smith received a Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. In addition, he received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement “honoring brilliance and resilience.” In 2018 he received the Religion and The Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion. In 2019 he received the UCLA Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the University of California, Los Angeles. United States Artists named Smith a 2021 USA Fellow, and he has been selected as a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM). Earlier in 2022, he also was commissioned by the LA Philharmonic to write the orchestral piece Gondwana: Earth, a Blue Sanctuary, Oceans, Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Springs and Lagoons; Paradise Gardens and Skies, as well as String Quartet #13, performed by the JACK Quartet.

Smith’s America’s National Parks earned wide praise as one of the best albums of 2016 from The New York Times, the NPR Jazz Critics Poll, The Wire and many other media outlets and was voted 2016 Jazz Album of the Year in DownBeat Magazine’s 65th Annual International Critics Poll, which also honored Smith as Jazz Artist and Trumpeter of the Year and featured him on the cover of the magazine twice: in November 2016 and August 2017. He was named Artist of the Year in the 2016 Jazz Times’ Critics Poll.

The Jazz Journalists Association has honored Smith as their 2013 Musician of the Year, 2015 Composer of the Year, 2016 Trumpeter of the Year, 2017 Musician of the Year plus Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer, and the 2022 Trumpeter of the Year. In 2022, Smith earned the Vision Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Among Smith’s numerous other awards, commissions and residencies are an Other Minds residency that commissioned Taif, a string quartet (2008); Fellow of the Jurassic Foundation (2008); FONT (Festival of New Trumpet) Award of Recognition (2008); Islamic World Arts Initiative of Arts International (2004); Fellow of the Civitela Foundation (2003); Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2001); “Third Culture Copenhagen” in Denmark presenting a paper on Ankhrasmation (1996); Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program (1996); Asian Cultural Council Grantee to Japan (June-August 1993); Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program (1990); New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Music (1990); National Endowment for the Arts Music Grants (1972, 1974, 1981).

Smith has performed and/or recorded with Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Cecil Taylor, Steve McCall, Anthony Davis, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee, Tadao Sawai, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ed Blackwell, Kazuko Shiraishi, Han Bennink, Marion Brown, Charlie Haden, Malachi Favors Magoustous, Jack DeJohnette, Vijay Iyer, Ikue Mori, Min Xiao Fen, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Frank Lowe, among many others.

Smith’s compositions have been performed by numerous contemporary music ensembles: RedKoral Quartet, Orkiestra Symfoniczna NFM (Wroclaw), AACM-Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Players, New Century Players, LA Phil New Music Group, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Contemporary Chamber Players (University of Chicago), S.E.M. Ensemble, Southwest Chamber Music, Del Sol String Quartet, New York New Music Ensemble, ne(x)tworks, and California E.A.R. Unit.

For over two decades, Smith has been creating music for multiple ensembles, including works that take several days to perform: Ten Freedom Summers (2011, RedCat, Los Angeles); “Tabligh” for double-ensemble (Golden Quartet and Classical Persian ensemble at Merkin Concert Hall, NYC 2006); Golden Quartet and Suleyman Erguner’s Classical Turkish ensemble (Akbank Music Festival in Istanbul 2007). His largest work “Odwira” for 12 multi-ensembles (52 instrumentalists) was performed at California Institute of the Arts in March 1995.

Booklet for Fire Illuminations